Lawfare Profile in the New York Times Magazine

This morning, Emily Bazelon of the New York Times Magazine wrote a thoughtful profile of Lawfare: “How a Wonky National-Security Blog Hit the Big Time.” The piece reflects some of the wild year we’ve had at Lawfare, as our writers have grappled with what President Trump’s campaign, election, and administration mean for hard national security choices. Lawfare doesn’t take institutional positions and, unsurprisingly, the people who have written for the site hold diverse views on the many subjects the Trump presidency has put on the agenda. What the site’s writers all share is an interest in the rigorous, disciplined discussion of national security law and a belief that those on the other side of an issue are interlocutors, not enemies.

The growth of Lawfare’s readership and impact remains a continual source of amazement. (Ben begins each year by wrongly predicting that Lawfare has reached a plateau.) We have given up trying to guess where the site might go next, but the magazine piece does offers a nice opportunity to reflect on the evolution thus far. Lawfare began as a blog on which three friends and colleagues could publicly talk about interesting national security legal issues. Today, as Bazelon writes, it has,

developed into a go-to bipartisan site for remarkably speedy and informed analysis about all matters related to “Hard National Security Choices,” as the blog’s tag line puts it, including counterterrorism and immigration.

With a steady stream of writing by law professors and law students as well as former Bush and Obama officials, Lawfare has helped translate and test the legal and policy framework that lawyers in the military and intelligence communities have hammered out.

We are grateful to have played the role we have and to the many people who devote time and expertise to writing for Lawfare. We are particularly proud of the many law students who have done extraordinary work on this site over the years. And we are grateful as well to our readers, both new and old. Your intellectual engagement (and financial support) not only make Lawfare possible, but also a privilege and joy to be a part of.

Susan Hennessey is the Executive Editor of Lawfare and General Counsel of the Lawfare Institute. She is a Brookings Fellow in National Security Law. Prior to joining Brookings, Ms. Hennessey was an attorney in the Office of General Counsel of the National Security Agency. She is a graduate of Harvard Law School and the University of California, Los Angeles.

Benjamin Wittes is editor in chief of Lawfare and a Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution. He is the author of several books and is co-chair of the Hoover Institution's Working Group on National Security, Technology, and Law.